node.js ko
ACROnode.com
ACROnode.com
by rochester-js
ACROnode is a wordplay game where players are given a random acronym and are challenged to create “backronyms.” For example, when presented with NBAM you might play Narwhal Bacons At Midnight.
Loosely based on the original Acrophobia IRC game, players score each other’s backronyms and are awarded points based on the number of votes, for being the first to submit your backronym, etc.
Some are asking about voting. You can’t vote for yourself, so if your the only one in the game, voting will seem empty. You get a point for each vote as well as a point for each letter. If you were also the first to submit you get two points. Those that voted for the winner also get a point.
Judging Instructions
Please use a modern browser (as the app is currently untested in any flavor of IE). If you enter the game during a voting round, your vote will not count (since you have not submitted a backronym of your own). This is a feature of the rules, not a bug.
NOTE If the app is acting wonky with more than 11 people in a room – please tell one of us via Twitter and we can reset it. We have also setup a cron job to restart the site every 15mins to help combat the problem. After judging is done we have a fix for this. (oops?)
Who
nextfeature — Rochester, NY
davidmoffitt — Rochester, NY / Whitefish, MT
nathos — Rochester, NY
stats — Rochester NY
How
Core:
Front-end:
Hosting / Platforms:
Prototyping / Design:
Software / Tools:
Votes
Your Vote
Voting is now closed.
Other Votes
(43)
jimpickjudgeChrisCinelli
contestantGreat great design!
AnkurBulsarajudgeReally liked the design, it was fun to play. Creating these backronyms was addictive.
There were a couple of timer issues. Also, the voting is a little confusing. With less players, the voting should probably be asynchronous for the submitter.
slaskis
contestantVery well executed 48 hours, cudos!
iapainjudgeLove your design and well executed but it lacks wow-factor. Not fun when you are lone in room.
sonnyg95
contestantWas by myself but can see the fun in this when playing with other people.
therazorbladejudgeThis is lots of fun! If only it wasn’t so buggy. The timer bar was covering some of the player names, could not always vote on other answers. Sometimes hitting backspace canceled participation in the round. Also, why the crazy Twitter app permissions?
Same as Acronyms with Strangers.
- contestant
We didn’t get to test in every browser out there. Would you mind sharing what browser you were seeing the problems in?
- therazorbladejudge
FF6 but same green bar issue on Chrome. I got the rest to work and only had the backspace bug once. Added another star for completeness.
adinardijudgeAddicting and easy to use. Popped in and immediately started playing.
I was in a room of only two people and it felt a bit “slow” due to the timing on the game. Perhaps if everyone has submitted for that timer, just immediately go on.
It definitely felt nearly done. Good stuff!
andrewfchenjudgeI could see this game being pretty fun but I had no one in the room to play with so I wasn’t able to experience it in full. But I gave points for the possibility of fun. The rest of my comments come from the bias of only experiencing the game without any other players.
The general functionality was quite smooth. Some super simple instructions could help. Also, a simple feature that allows the user to invite other friends would help, too. Therefore I docked points for completeness. Design was nice but not amazing.
- contestant
Thanks for the feedback.
I’d encourage you to check out the game during the day when others are playing it, it’s definitely fun with 3+ players.
nelsonkchengjudgeThis is great. It’s well thought out, fun, and works.
My main complaint is how it works. If I finish with the backronym early — it still makes me wait the entire time after I submit. Then it waits for votes (and when I’m playing it right now, no one is there to vote.) Would be great if it was designed in a way where it wasn’t real time (or I could turn that off.) So my backronyms could be voted over time. And I could get follow-up emails letting me know how my backronyms are doing, or the top backronyms — or even a points system / leader board. Lots of possibilities.
Great job.
- contestant
Thanks for the feedback!
The game is designed to be played in real-time by at least 3 players, though we removed that restriction so people could try the game during the judging period regardless of how many people were currently logged-in.
We’ll definitely be considering other methods of play, but hopefully lack of players won’t be an issue in the future ;)
lovehasnologic
contestantReally darn nice. Looks wonderful and though I was only there by myself, I could see this being a shitload of fun with a group of people. I can imagine loading this up at a party with a bunch of laptop toting friends and having a blast with it (the same way we used to have fun making shit up while playing Balderdash). Definitely bookmarked and kudos to you.
- contestant
Thanks for the compliments! We are looking forward to being able to tweak it and publicize the heck out of it post-launch, it IS a lot of fun with a big group of players :)
stevencoronajudgeawesome and unique game, site design is great, seems really fluid and runs smoothly in chrome. wish there were more people to play with.
- contestant
Thank you! We are hoping to take this further post-NKO, we had a bug at the end which messes things up with > 10 people, so we’ve actually tried to keep it on the down-low, probably too much, it IS a lot more fun with many players.
aashay
contestantI guess this isn’t very fun at the moment since I’m playing by myself but I can see this being a ton of fun with friends!
One thing that’s confusing: It says “Backronyms submitted” but every time I press enter and submit one, my textbox doesn’t reset. I cleared it and tried adding more but at the end of the round I only had one submitted. It needs to be more clear that only the most recent Backronym is the one that gets submitted.
Also, it’d be cool to run the words against basic dictionary checks. I was able to submit all sorts of garbage (although I guess the idea is for people to vote on the best ones so maybe this is a non-issue).
- contestant
Sorry for the confusion re: submitted. The way the game is supposed to work is that if you submit a new one, it over-writes the old, you get one “submission” per round and that’s what other players vote on / you get scored by. With nobody else playing, and thus nothing to see on the scoring screen, that wasn’t very clear – we’ll need to write up a “Rules & Scoring” section soon :) Thank you for your feedback and I’m glad you think it will be fun.
jacob-harding
contestantTerrific design and and very intuitive. I could see this being very fun once a game gets to 8 or so players.
- contestant
Yeah it’s pretty ridiculous with > 5 people, everyone’s rushing to be first-submitted (you get bonus points) – its even more fun with people in the same room or chatting together (we’d been debating adding a chatroom function to it too but just didn’t have time). Thanks again for playing it!
cly
contestantCouldn’t find any other players at this hour but I could see how it could be super fun! Nice clean design, well polished. Game is new to me so innovation win!
- contestant
We plan on adding bots / AI post-NKO to address that, the original (IRC) game was typically a minimum of 3 players for that exact reason, but we didn’t want people to not see it at all if nobody else was currently playing. Thank you again for your feedback!
rauchgjudgeThis game brought back the feeling of excitement I got from swarmation last year. Great job guys!
ps: we should do a meetup at dinosaur bbq.
- contestant
So glad you enjoyed it! I am very much down for bbq ;)
joaomilho
contestantSuper complete and fun. Not news.
seanami
contestantI love the game! I thought the game itself and was fun, and the voting feature provides a nice mechanic to interact with the other people playing the game.
I don’t like that I have to log in with real credentials. Why? Just let me choose a username so that I can get in as quickly as possible and not have to trust you with a login.
I was lucky enough to play with some other people on Sunday night after the competiton and it was a ton of fun! Much less fun now with an empty room. Maybe a demo mode that “fakes” other players that generate fake backronyms and votes?
The design is really gorgeous, especially for a 48 hour competition. I love the fonts and the grunge. The polish of the UI is really nice.
Unfortunately, when you guys demo’d this, there were some really obvious issues with synchronization across multiple games, as the timer bars and letters kept changing randomly. It worked much better later with (I assume) only one game going, but that’s where the completeness points went.
Overall, great job!
- contestant
In hindsight, it might’ve been better to skips log-ins altogether, at least for the purposes of the competition. Down the road we’ll likely want to leverage social networks for promotion, etc.
We look forward to polishing things up more after judging. Thanks for the feedback!
ragavanjudgeFun game, logging in was easy. The game itself was pretty intuitive and pretty feature complete for a weekend hack. Well done.
Felt like it had a lot going on though for a simple game. The voting feature in particular didn’t seem to add a lot to the game and despite the instructions ended up confusing me. I also felt it would have been nice to have had some basic levels (easy/medium/hard) built in and also throw in some hints to inspire participation. I would have also liked to have seen the game be more social instead of just using twitter/facebook etc for authentication.
- contestant
Voting is a key part of the game, but that really only shines when there are multiple players (we’ll eventually require a minimum of 3 players to start a game).
We hope to build out the social integration in the future. Thanks for your feedback!
caseycrites
contestantI really want to like this, but I ran into some issues. The design is very nice, flows pretty smoothly. However, I was playing alone and there was no way to gain points as far as I could tell. Also, I typed an acronym and after it was accepted I had to delete it in order to type another. This is close to being a fun game, just needs a bit more work. Nice work guys.
- contestant
Points are only awarded with votes, so it requires multiple players to work.
We were going to require a 3-player minimum, but we figured that would mean lots of non-functional games during the judging period :)
ara_pjudge
wh__l_rjudge
wjgilmorejudgeVery well done, great work.
cramforcejudgeAwesome Idea, very nice graphics and overall execution!
christopherdebeer
contestant
rcrowleyjudgeYou’d get a perfect completeness score if you didn’t ask for so many Twitter permissions, which caused me to click No on Twitter, which threw a 500 error on Acronode.
- contestant
Thank you for bringing the issue of twitter permissions to light. I will be addressing these immediately as we certainly don’t need that much permission.
danielleswank
contestantReally really nice design. The animations are smooth and well executed. I like the game play as well, but was wondering about how the rounds work. What happens if you are on round 7 and someone joins? Will they go to round 7 or start on round 3? Over all you built a very nice well executed game.
- contestant
Clarity of rules is certainly something we will address. People can join at any time. If someone comes with 10seconds on the clock in the submission stage, they can still submit. This was intentional. In the voting stage, you can’t vote if you don’t submit. And of course results doesn’t have any interaction. I hope that clears it up a little.
airportyh
contestantBeautiful design. But sorry to say I didn’t get it. It was unclear to me how the voting works? How do I vote?
- contestant
I actually saw you in there while I was in. It needs players. When you get a room of 4+ it becomes a lot more fun.
Coreh
contestantI love the concept and the design overall -Specially the page background and typefaces. (They remind me of ATARI cartridges from the 80s)
My only complaint is that some of the features didn’t work for me when I tested it, notably the Facebook login and the countdown.
Good work overall!
- contestant
The Facebook login has been touch and go. We will certainly look into it once judging is done.
jasonmcleod
contestantthis is really fun! I like to come up with more than just one answer though.. I think it should accept all the ones that one user submits and show them for voting. Also I think the server crashed both times another player joined :(
Techwraith
contestantmustardamus
contestant
Unfortunately, nobody else to play with, but it looks like fun. It looks awesome.